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The Politics and Poems of Adrienne Rich

By John Williams March 28, 2012 7:50 pmMarch 28, 2012 7:50 pm

In 1973, reviewing Adrienne Rich’s seventh book of poems, “Diving Into the Wreck,” Margaret Atwood called it “one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself. It is a book that takes risks, and it forces the reader to take them also.” Ms. Rich, who died on Wednesday at 82, spent her career forcing such confrontations.

Reviewing “Midnight Salvage,” a collection of Ms. Rich’s poems from the 1990s, for The Times, Matthew Flamm wrote: “Rich’s unwavering passion for a more just world is in constant dialogue with her sense of life’s impossible complexity.” In the last two decades, the paper documented the many awards Ms. Rich received, as well as those she resisted. In 1997, Ms. Rich declined to accept a National Medal for the Arts from President Bill Clinton, saying that art was “incompatible with the cynical politics of this Administration.” She told a reporter, “I am not against government in general, but I am against a government where so much power is concentrated in so few hands.”

Ms. Rich, who published her first book in 1951, made generations of fans. In her new memoir, “Wild,” about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while grieving over the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed writes about adding a book of Ms. Rich’s poems to her already dangerously overweight backpack: “I’d read ‘The Dream of a Common Language’ so often that I’d practically memorized it. In the previous few years, certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn’t regret carrying it one iota — even though carrying it meant that I could no more than hunch beneath its weight.”

In a 1989 review, Jay Parini identified what he called “the mature Rich style: bright shards of thought and feeling held in loose communion by an overarching, frequently angry voice.” Other critics were less taken with the aggrieved tone of Ms. Rich’s work. In 1987, William Logan criticized the increasingly political nature of her poems, writing that “she allows what once was an instrument in her hands to become just a blunt instrument,” and, “One senses in her the wish to integrate the realms of her experience — poetry and politics, art and activism. The more she tries to fuse them, however, the more deeply they remain divided; in her work what is poetry isn’t political, and what is political isn’t poetry.”

Some critics have accused Ms. Rich of being increasingly political and thus somehow less of a poet. When asked about this she smiled and looked away in thought. “One man said my politics trivialized my poetry,” she said. “I don’t think politics is trivial — it’s not trivial for me. And what is this thing called literature? It’s writing. It’s writing by all kinds of people. Including me.”